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By Dr John Walsby
The ancestors of modern man
were all hunter gatherers. They roamed the land and shorelines
killing what they could with primitive weapons and they also
collected fruit, nuts, insects and shellfish to fill their
stomachs.
Being clever creatures, people
developed cunning skills that made them better at killing,
trapping and gathering and their population numbers grew quickly
wherever food was fairly plentiful. But human success was
limited by supply and when most of the slow prey had been
caught and the easily gathered foods had been over harvested,
population growth slowed.
Eventually people learnt to
cultivate crops, like wheat, rice, beans and cabbage, and
to domesticate wild animals like sheep, cattle, pigs and chickens.
This allowed the human population to expand rapidly and people
began to dominate life on the planet.
As farmers and crop growers
we no longer needed to hunt or gather wild foods but to survive
but it has been difficult to repress our natural instinct
to exploit nature. If we go to the beach to gather shellfish
today it is not to save ourselves from starving but to find
a special treat.
We all enjoy treats and want
our children and grandchildren to enjoy them too but all over
the world the special shoreline foods we used to gather are
becoming harder to find. They have been over harvested or
else their habitats have been damaged by silt and other pollutants
washed down from the overdeveloped land.
New settlers in New Zealand
may think the beaches here are rich with clams, crabs and
various snails compared with overseas shores. However, even
in New Zealand with its low population and extensive coastline,
many seashore animals that were common just 50 years ago are
now rare or extinct on many shores.
Crayfish could once be caught
in the shallows without diving and paua were found along most
rocky shores but are now very hard to find on the shores of
Auckland and Northland. Along Northland's west coast the population
of large and delicious clam, the toheroa, collapsed and it
has now been illegal to gather them for more than 20 years.
Many of our broad estuary flats that once held thousand of
tonnes of cockles and hundreds of tonnes of pipis now have
very few that are big enough to eat.
If we want to preserve the fun
and privilege of collecting shellfish for our children and
grandchildren it is vital that we begin to exercise control
over our hunter gatherer instincts and adopt attitudes of
restraint. There are clear legal limits for species like cockles
and mussels - just 50 per person per day - but if one person,
quite legally, takes the last 50, it would remove the last
of the breeding stock.
It would help if we all began
to set our own limits. This might be: for every 20 crabs,
sea eggs (urchins) or carnivorous snails (whelks) you find
on a shore you should only take one. If you cannot find 20
there, don't take any. If the crab, urchin and whelk numbers
get too low they will never have a chance to mate and breed
and in three or four years there will be none at all. None
of us want that.
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